Visual Novel / Vampire Therapist

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Meet Sam Walls.

Once Slaughtering Sam, a ruthless vampire outlaw who killed and ate anyone in his way, Sam finally made the realization he needed to change, and spent decades working on his own issues. This attracted the attention of Andromachos, a powerful and ancient vampire with his own interest in dealing with the psychology of monsters. He hired Sam, and brought him to Germany to recruit him for his mission – to finally end the ingrained mental health issues of the dead.

It won't be easy – vampires are set in their ways, and it will take a lot to undo their cognitive distortions and negative thought patterns. But someone has to do it, because even monsters can need help.

Vampire Therapist is a 2024 Urban Fantasy Visual Novel by Little Bat Games, about the world's first vampire therapist. Utilizing genuine psychiatric concepts verified by licensed psychiatrists, it explains the ideas behind cognitive behavioral therapy through the lens of immortal, traumatized vampires. Can Sam help these tragic creatures of the night to overcome their many self-destructive urges?

And can he finally come to terms with his own past at the same time?

The game received a DLC in February 2025 for Couples Therapy where Sam has to apply his skills in helping a vampire couple on the verge of a bloody break up figure out how to navigate relationships when "Death do you part" does not apply.

Vampire Therapist contains examples of:

• Actually Not a Vampire: At the start of the game, you meet two ominous, tall, gothic people talking about blood and their hunger in the night. They're not the vampire you were brought here to meet; they're just goths.
• Affably Evil: For a manipulative and amoral cult leader, Meddy is a pretty sweet Nerd in Evil's Helmet, telling funny jokes and cute stories that all abruptly end in violent murder.
• Age-Gap Romance: In the Couples Therapy DLC, Franco-Persian couple Momo and Reza have a few centuries between them.
• All Therapists Are Muggles: the entire premise of the game is an inversion of the trope. Sam is a vampire, so his vampire clients can be open with him in a way that would be impossible with mortal therapists, and in the event they turn violent, he can actually walk out of the session alive (for some value of alive)
• Always a Bigger Fish: Andromachos is one of the most powerful and dangerous vampires in the world, and it's stated that this is one of the reasons why these dangerous vampires are agreeing to sit down and discuss their personal issues with you. Sure enough, the few times that a client does try to attack you or otherwise harm the club, Andromachos generally appears to stop them.
• Americans Are Cowboys: while Sam isn't the only American in the game (as Crimson is also from the US), his western attire, southern drawl, and fondness for gun metaphors often draw a lot of comments from the rest of the cast that imply they see him as a typical example of an American.
• Analogy Backfire:
  • Sam refers to choosing the concepts he'll focus on in his upcoming therapy session as "getting locked and loaded". Andromachos, at one point, brings up the worrying implications of referring to medical concepts as things you're going to use to attack someone with.
  • One of the cognitive distortions is Mind Reading, when you assume what another person is thinking rather than actually asking them. Sam has to ask — given they're all vampires — if it still counts if you actually did read the other person's mind.
  • In discussing Edmund Kean's neuroses, Andromachos can point out that he disregards the audience's autonomy and acts like they're hostages forced to come to his plays...before admitting that given Edmund's nature as a dangerously violent Attention Whore, he can't rule out the possibility that they were.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: A strange variant. Before a session, you have to choose exactly 5 distortions to focus on in the remaining session, on the grounds that doing otherwise risks beating the patient over the head any time they talk. The issue is that you can't change this in the session, meaning you're committed to those five no matter what the patient actually says.
• The Atoner:
  • Sam Walls used to be a brutal, bloodthirsty outlaw in the wild west before finding mortals that cared about him enough to convince him to change his life around. This is what convinces him that no one is beyond redemption, and that he can lead other vampires out of the need to hurt mortals.
  • Andromachos also mentions that he was once a far more terrifying and dangerous vampire than he is now. In the side stories, you get to hear the grisly details, and they're not pretty.
• Attention Whore: Edmund Kean's main issue – he demands constant attention and adoration at all times, to the point of becoming violent if he doesn't get it. It's because his charm and acting got him out of poverty, and he's subconsciously terrified of returning the gutter if he's ignored.
• Bad Influencer: Meddy, a video game streamer who is exploiting her fanbase to get slaves and meals. It's bad for her too — healing requires convincing her that mass attention isn't making her any less lonely, and she needs real friendships.
• Been There, Shaped History: He’s not happy about it, but before he became the Friendly Neighbourhood Vampire he is today, Andromachos was responsible for, or at least a major factor in, the fall of Troy, the corruption of Rome, and the Witch Hunts as part of his spiteful crusade against humanity over his lover's death.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Meddy is a goofy and silly woman who's constantly making weird jokes and dresses like a cosplayer. She's also a 2000-year-old vampire, and most of her funny stories end with her brutally murdering someone.
• Bittersweet Ending: In Couple's Therapy, Momo and Reza eventually decided to break up despite Sam's best attempt to get them to reconcile, but they part as Amicable Exes and Friends with Benefits, figuring that while they don't work as a couple, they still do like each other.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • Lady Isabella D'Este tells Sam she watched Space Wars: Rise of the Spacewalker, which was the trigger for her perception that art produced nowadays is worthless.
  • In Meddy's sessions, she mentions she plays a game titled Call of Nationalism.
• Catchphrase: Typically following one of Sam's sessions, Andy will bid him a cheerful "Rest in Peace" as they go their separate ways.
• Control Freak: Isabella, whose core cognitive distortion is the Control Fallacy. As far as she's concerned, she's the only one keeping the world from imploding into sin, inanity and failure, and she desperately strives to have total control over everyone around her. And herself too. She's clinging to impossible standards to justify her own existence, and is terrified that breaking them will make everything she's done worthless.
• Crusading Lawyer: Crimson was once one of these, specializing in taking down those who used corrupt laws to evade punishment, before she left the bar after discovering she had cancer. You can convince her to return to fighting the good fight, especially against Sam's former bosses
• Curse That Cures: Downplayed. Crimson has terminal cancer, and is drinking just enough vampire blood to keep herself alive but not enough to turn. She knows that she'll have to make the choice one way or another eventually, but she's scared of either option. You can help her decide.
• Don't Think, Feel: When trying to talk Andromachos out of suicide, identifying cognitive distortions in his reasoning is useless — he's experienced and intelligent enough to counter all of them. Even when you identify the right one, he simply explains why it doesn't apply and it's removed from your options. The way to stop him, once all your options are gone, is to show him compassion.
• Empty Shell: Edmund Kean. He's been acting for so long that he's forgotten who he actually is, and has virtually no personality or goals when not in character. He laments that he can tell you every subtle motivation and character quirk of Richard III, Hamlet and Macbeth – but couldn't tell you a thing about Edmund.
• Enemy Within: All of Dr Drayne's repressed desires have become a malicious second personality called Lord Luridius, who cares about nothing but sex, food and violence. He aims to take over the body, and temporarily succeeds, although Dr Drayne accepting those impulses as part of him causes a Split-Personality Merge.
• Europeans Are Kinky: The whole game is set in Leipzig, Germany, and the first people Sam (an American cowboy from the 1800s) meets in Germany are a human Goth couple that make a move on him.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Andromachos's reason for turning his life around. While he was a cruel and brutal murderer, the industrial, faceless death of WW1 made him realise how pointless evil was and how reveling in it didn't make him any kind of grand monster, just pathetic.
• Everyone Is Bi: Andromachos states that all vampires are pansexual regardless of their sexuality in life (with the possible exception of a single coven in Washington who "aren't fooling anyone"). All the vampires we see certainly are, and Sam can discuss his surprise when he realized that he wasn't straight anymore in his therapy sessions.
• Eye Scream: Meddy doesn't have two different coloured eyes – her pink eye is a fake one, put in after witch hunters gouged out the other one. She jokes about it, but it's clear the trauma is one of the main factors in her current world-view
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: While the focus is on vampires, various patient's sessions will reveal at least the existence of werewolves, wizards and demons.
• Florence Nightingale Effect: Defied. While Isabella and Sam clearly have some attraction to each other, Sam — somewhat reluctantly – admits that professional ethics prevent him from acting on it.
• Freudian Excuse: While your clients are evil people by any reasonable standard, all of them are coming from a place of pain and fear, and helping them uncover it and move on is your main goal as a therapist.
• Freudian Trio: A one-person example. Dr Drayne has split his mind into two personalities – the utterly repressed and work-obsessed Dr. Drayne (Superego) and the feral and mindlessly hedonistic Lord Luridius (Id). If you succeed, you get him to combine them into one personality that's able to have fun while working on long-term goals, simply called Drayne.
• Friendless Background: Under all the hatred and fear of humanity, Meddy is desperately lonely from centuries living alone in the woods, thus her obsessive attempts to fill the void with the Algorithm and her fans. You have to convince her to make real friends to heal her.
  • Edmund too didn't really have friends, having been exploited by virtually everyone until he came of age, which help give him the belief that nobody wants Edmund the person but Edmund the actor
• Friendly Neighbourhood Vampire: Sam and Andromachos are kind-hearted men who feed only on the consenting. Their goal is to convince more vampires to live like that, which requires getting past the centuries of negative thought patterns they've built up.
• Frozen Fashion Sense: This seems to hint at the specific issues vampires have - Dr. Drayne, Andy, and Meddy have modern fashion senses, but Isabella and Edmund are dressed in the fashion of Renaissance Italy and Georgian England, respectively, indicating their inability to move on from their past. Sam is a downplayed example, as while his fashion sense hasn't really changed, his attire isn't particularly outdated; it's just severely out of place in Germany.
• Game Face: When she finally expresses her fury, Isabella's face turns monstrous as she screams threats at Sam. She apologises for it once she's cooled down. Sam showed his own when Lord Luridius tries to attack him, proving that while his "Slaughtering Sam" days are behind him, he's no slouch.
• Grand Dame: Isabella gives off the appearance of one – an uptight, upper-class, older lady of great dignity. It's mostly because that's what she thinks she should be, and helping her find the other aspects of her personality is an essential part of her therapy.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Heinrich Kramer, the author of the Malleus Maleficarum and Sam's sire, is on the other side of the ocean at this point, but his cruelties are deeply involved in both Sam and Andromachos' stories
  • The Algorithm is the work of a fallen angel named Raziel, in both Meddy's story, and implied in the Couple's Therapy DLC.
• Historical Domain Character: Isabella D'Este and Edmund Kean are two of the vampires you must treat, and Heinrich Kramer is revealed to be the vampire behind Sam's turning. In the DLC, Antoine-François Momoro ("Momo" for short) is one half of a couple Sam has to help. John Muir the naturalist is mentioned as Sam's first gay crush, but doesn't actually appear in game.
• If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: To join his outlaw gang, Sam was forced to kill the thing he loved most – in his case, his beloved horse Princess. It still haunts him to this day.
• I Have Boobs, You Must Obey!: Meddy is a beautiful woman, and regularly gets minions through seduction. In the modern day, she's updated this to an OnlyFans account.
• Insufferable Genius:
  • Dr. Drayne is a genius scientist, and it shows. He's also a deeply bitter man who sees everyone stupider than him (that is, everyone) with contempt, and that shows, too.
  • Isabella is an extremely intelligent and highly educated woman, as befitting the mother of the Renaissance. She's acutely aware of how few people hold up to her standards in this manner.
  • Momo comes off as this, a French revolutionary who is extremely savvy in political sciences and a hard reason-based Atheist. This is part of the strife between him and his partner Reza who feels like Momo talks down to him and treats him like an ignorant baby.
• It's All About Me: The Personalisation distortion – the belief that everything in the world, for better or worse, is personally focused on you. Edmund Kean, who sees the entire future of acting and maybe the world as hanging on his acting talent, has this as his core distortion.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Underneath all the snobbishness, arrogance and domineering, Isabella is a genuinely kind woman who wants to help those around her. She simply doesn't have a way of expressing that except via impossible standards and aggression to those who break them.
• Justified Save Point: It's mentioned that Andromachos has mild precognitive powers, so if you were about to say anything that would permanently ruin a patient's recovery, or otherwise go seriously wrong, he'll send a mental message to make you stop. Thus why you go back and try again if you misidentify a distortion.
• Kiss of the Vampire: Being bitten by vampires is an explicitly sexual experience for both parties, and many people actively go out of their way to get bitten.
• Living Forever Is Awesome: Zigzagged. While many of the vampires have problems with the world changing in a way they no longer fit in with, and Drayne hates having to drink blood, all of them seem to see eternal life inherently as neutral at best. Sam mentions in one final session that one of the advantages of living forever is that it's never too late to change - no matter how many bad things you've done and how long it will take to redeem yourself, you always have that time.
• Looks Like Orlok: Bert is the least human looking out of the cast - balding, wrinkled, with pointed ears and a strange nose. Unlike most examples, he's quite muscular in build... given he is the bouncer. No explanation is given for why he looks so different.
• Master of Illusion: Edmund Kean is so skilled at gaslighting himself and others that he can actually change people's perception of reality, which he almost uses to make Sam abandon his quest during their first session before Andromachos stops him.
• The Mentor: Andromachos is this to Sam, an older vampire who's training Sam in therapy to become the next vampire therapist and take up his role so he can finally kill himself.
• My God, What Have I Done?: When he finally breaks his web of self-deception, Edmund Kean breaks down in guilt over how many lives he's destroyed – including his own son's – in a desperate attempt to remain center of attention.
• The Narcissist: Edmund Kean, as diagnosed by Andromachos. Utterly obsessed with his own skill and reputation, demanding constant praise and adoration, unable to see the world in any way but related to him, furious at any opposition and completely empty underneath it all.
• New Media Are Evil: Meddy is clearly being made unhappy by her influencer life and her constant need to produce more content. In addition, when Meddy says she's enslaved to the Algorithm, she's not speaking in metaphors. It's revealed the Algorithm is a literal fallen angel bent on reducing all humanity to numbers.
• Painful Persona: Both Meddy and Edmund experience some form of it - Meddy is clearly unhappy about playing games she didn't actually like and how she had to mold her personality to appease the parasocial relationships the algorithm arranged for her, while Edmund has become so focused on being the peerless actor that he has no idea what he truly wants or who he is - pointing out their personas are hurting them is a key to getting breakthroughs
• The Paranoiac: Meddy, as a result of abuse and victimisation at a young age, sees everyone in the world as a threat and is convinced that anyone would turn on her at the slightest provocation, to the point she won't leave her house. For all her extreme power, she's still no less scared than she was as a human. You can point out this contradiction to her to help her get past it.
• The Perfectionist: Isabella's hang-up – it's mentioned that at one point she burned one of Da Vinci's paintings because its windows were the wrong shape. This drove away her family in life, and her repressed guilt and anger over that is one of her main suppressed feelings.
• The Redeemer: Sam, having had a kind hand turn his life around from violence and cruelty, is now dedicated to being that helping hand to others who think they're Beyond Redemption.
• Seers: Panoptibella is a young woman who attends the night club and can see the future.
• Shout-Out: In Edmund Kean's fourth session, he comes to the realization that he played other characters too well, he forgot himself, and mentions how other vampires asked "What is a man, anyway? A miserable pile of secrets."
• Shown Their Work:
  • All the cognitive distortions that Sam learns and uses are real psychology concepts actually used in therapy, and have all been vetted by licensed psychiatrists. One of the aims of the game is to teach these concepts to people so they can use them to get out of their own negative thought patterns.
  • At one point, Andromachos mentions how he had an enemy in his early days called Aneus, who he immaturely called Anus. Given this was in classical Greece, it might seem like a case of Orphaned Etymology, but "anus" was in fact a term for the rectum already at that point.
• Silver Fox: Sam was in his 50s when he became a vampire with visibly graying hair, and isn't a bad-looking man, and is constantly hit on not only by other vampires but mortals in their 20s and 30s, much to his confusion and sometimes discomfort.
• Southern-Fried Genius: Sam looks and acts like a cowboy right from the Old West, but he's an extremely skilled therapist, especially given he's primarily self-taught. At several points, his highly educated and sophisticated clients are surprised at his wisdom.
• Split-Personality Merge: The end of Dr Drayne's arc – he accepts that the violent passions of Lord Lurdidius are part of him, and the two personalities form into one balanced one.
• Stepford Smiler: Under the wise, jokey mentor facade, Andromachos is consumed with overwhelming guilt over his past actions, and you have to talk him out of committing suicide at the end of the visual novel.
• Suicide by Sunlight: Andromachos attempts this at the climax of the game, the guilt of his past having overwhelmed him and having finally given himself justification to do so with Sam taking up his mantel. Your final challenge as a therapist is to talk him out of it.
• Suppressed Rage: Under the Proper Lady facade, Isabella is filled with intense anger at her family, especially her philandering husband and how he traded their son to the Vatican. Getting her to face that rage is essential to her progress, although she nearly attacks Sam when the dam breaks.
• There Are No Therapists: You're at the start of a defiance – Sam and Andromachos are the first vampire therapists in the world, hoping to change the way vampires see their unlife.
• Troll: Andromachos is very prone to playful teasing or pranking Sam and delighting in his flustered reactions. To his great shame, he used to be a far darker version of this trope, corrupting or destroying societies just to see how far he could go. One of his "pranks" was the Witch Trials.
• Vampire Dance: Parodied. Despite being in a nightclub, Sam utterly refuses to dance, saying he's not the dancing type. When coaxed to do so to celebrate Dr. Drayne's breakthrough, we never see it, but his dancing is best described as Goth Square Dancing
• Vampires Are Sex Gods: It's made very clear that almost all vampires, especially older vampires, are hyper-sexual — Dr Drayne theorises that it might be a result of the brain getting increasingly desensitized to dopamine over the centuries and thus needing ever more stimulation. Sam, being relatively young, hasn't reached this point, and his discomfort about the whole thing is often played for laughs.
  Sam: Let me guess – you seduced her?
  Andromachos: Sam! Do you really think I just fucked my way through history?
  Sam: I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply anything, I just saw a trend and...
  Andromachos: Well, you were right.
• Vampires Own Night Clubs: The setting of the game is Andromachos' night club. It's an open secret that its clientele drink blood, and many of the mortal guests are here for that exact reason.
• Vegetarian Vampire: A rare negative example. Dr Drayne despises the thought of drinking blood and invests all his energy in creating an artificial supplement for it. The intense hatred towards what is, for better or worse, an essential biological need for him is shown as clearly unhealthy, and healing partially includes convincing him that he shouldn't be ashamed of needing to eat to survive.
• Voluntary Vampire Victim:
  • In between sessions, Sam can make use of goth vampire fans to sate his thirst.
  • Meddy has a legion of fans and Zealots, and describes that some of her followers agree to "serve" Meddy - some even willing to dispose of bodies for her.
• Wandering the Earth: Sam spent 70 years walking through the woods, which is how he discovered the concepts he did. Andromachos did a similar thing at the bottom of the sea.